Quick report
- Aspect
- North
- Red Flags
- Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 2926 m
- Slope Angle
- 35°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>The main red flag is the poor snowpack structure. It has all the ingredients - facets, then slab, then some new powder to make it ski well and provide a little additional loading. On the uphill, the snow was mostly supportable but at times your pole would sink into bottomless facets. This was most noticable in areas where rocks had created weak spots. </p> <p>I noticed one small collapse in a flat area.</p>
The profile above is a composite from a few hand/pole pits and the numbers are approximations. I didn't do formal tests in these pits but did see some variation in strength. In a few cases, the column I created with my pole failed on isolation. In others, I did a quick compression test with my shovel blade without results. The lower we skied, the snow was thinner and the facets were larger.
Right at treeline, we dug a pit in one wind loaded spot and found more than 2 meters of snow. Here the only weaknesses were in the new snow as the facets were buried by 1.5m of snow. Our CT and ECT test results were low 20's with generally poor shear quality. I didn't post a profile because it wasn't representative of most of the snow we saw today.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>As noted above in red flags, the shallow snow pack has all the ingredients for avalanches. </p>
New snow from this week really helped. Noticed a light rime crust particularly in more open areas. It didn't affect skiing much.